The Black Film Critics Circle has jumped on the “Zero Dark Thirty” bandwagon, handing the film Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actress honors. “Django Unchained” and “Lincoln” each won a pair of awards, Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Christoph Waltz) for the former, Best Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis) and Best Ensemble for the former. Check out the full list of winners below and keep track of the season via The Circuit.

Best Film
“Zero Dark Thirty”

Best Director
Kathryn Bigelow, “Zero Dark Thirty”

Best Actor
Daniel Day-Lewis, “Lincoln”

Best Actress
Jessica Chastain, “Zero Dark Thirty”

Best Supporting Actor
Christoph Waltz, “Django Unchained”

Best Supporting Actress
Anne Hathaway, “Les Misérables”

Best Adapted Screenplay
“Argo”

Best Original Screenplay
“Django Unchained”

Best Animated Film
“Rise of the Guardians”

Best Foreign Film
“The Intouchables”

Best Documentary
“The Central Park Five”

Best Ensemble
“Lincoln”

As indie sensation “Beasts of the Southern Wild” makes its way through the awards season, and director Benh Zeitlin and star Quvenzhané Wallis pick up countless breakthrough prizes along the way, it would be worth bearing in mind how the identity of the film grew from a little play by writer Lucy Alibar.

In the stage production “Juicy and Delicious,” there is no little girl. There is a boy, whose father is dying, much like Hushpuppy’s in the feature film, and for Alibar, it was a way of working through emotions she was feeling in the midst of a health scare with her own father.

“My dad got sick and I know it’s an irrational fear and I’m usually a pretty rational person but for some reason I just had this horrible sense that when his life ended, my life would end,” Alibar says. “So I was interested in exploring that and just figuring that out. I was really focusing on just that loss of a father, and that sense of when your parent dies, you die, too. And the parts of the parents that you hold onto and the parts of yourself that are related to your parents.”

Alibar’s father raised her in a forthright way, she says. It’s not all that unlike Hushpuppy’s father and his insistence on strength above softer emotions. “He raised me like a boy,” she says, “and I was really interested in why he did that. And the way he showed love was always very much about arm wrestling and letting me flex my muscles. He’d never tell me ‘I love you’ but he’d tell me how strong I am. He’d tell me ‘I’m the man.’ We would always arm wrestle and he would let me in; I never really knew that he was letting me win. The details of that relationship I was interested in exploring with a real child.”

And so, it’s fair to say Hushpuppy, as played by Wallis, is a surrogate for Alibar in many ways in the film. But this was never something she expected would have the scope of cinema. It was always a cobbled-together piece of handmade intimacy on the stage, until her friend, Zeitlin, came to her with an idea to expand not only the world of the film, but the thematic structure as well.

“Benh came to me with the idea of taking these characters, a father and a child, the father at the end of his life and the aurochs coming down to devour the children, and set that in south Louisiana,” she says. “He had driven to the end of the road and found a lot of what you see in the movie and thought the story of the play would be an echo of what’s happening to the land down there.”

Indeed, as Zeitlin told us in a separate interview in June around the release of the film, that setting spoke to the ideas of losing a way of life and culture that percolate throughout the film. “It’s a very ferocious, very resilient culture of people that have fought back against a lot,” Zeitlin said at the time, “and it values fearlessness and it values a strength in a way that you probably don’t see in a lot of other places.”

Alibar chalks Zeitlin’s connection to culture up to the fact that his parents are folklorists, “but he had this really keen sense of what you hold onto as your culture is vanishing,” she says. “We were both interested in loss and what you keep when everything’s being taken away from you.”

Adapting it into a film also allowed her to really expand on the idea of the aurochs (which look more like giant prehistoric boars than giant prehistoric cattle). With a “complete lack of budget” on the stage, it was a design element that never really had a chance to be developed. And of course, in “Beasts of the Southern Wild,” the use of practical effects makes those sequences some of the most compelling of the film. “I had no idea how Benh was going to pull that off,” Alibar says, “but that was such an important part of the story, this impending doom that Hushpuppy sees closing in.”

And while Hushpuppy is a surrogate for her in many ways, Alibar is also quick to note how Zeitlin projected plenty of his own youth and sensibilities into young Wallis. “He talks about her as the hero he’s always wanted to be,” she says. “But so much of my relationship with my dad is in the movie.”

Take any film from Sundance through a summer release and into the Oscar season and you’re bound to hit a fatigue wall at some point. That’s a long haul with busy high marks along the way, and the film shows no signs of stopping yet. For Alibar, though, it’s been a humbling ride, but a meaningful one as well.

“We’ve met so many people who share their own stories about their parents or their children or the land that they’re from, and it makes it this incredibly personal, deep, unique experience every time,” she says. “And also just traveling with the group. They’re all like my brothers. Mazie [Wallis’s nickname] feels like my daughter at this point, so it feels like we’re all family and it’s just a wonderful time. I couldn’t ask for a better group of people to be spending my time with.”

“Beasts of the Southern Wild” is currently available on DVD/Blu-ray and you may just be hearing even more about it in the next two months.

With the recent reveal of the Academy’s list of Best Original Song qualifiers — all 75 of them — the music branch has a wide swath of popular artists to choose from. Of course, the branch tends to focus on the work itself, not necessarily the talent involved, but it’s worth mentioning that Fiona Apple, Florence + the Machine, Karen O, Christina Aguilera, Adele, Keith Urban, Mumford and Sons, The Bootleggers & Emmylou Harris, Arcade Fire, Dolly Parton, Katy Perry, Paul Williams, Jordin Sparks and Norah Jones are all in the mix. That’s quite the role call.

There’s also a fantastic cross-section of international appeal, providing a real opportunity for the Academy. And one name, with that in mind, could stand out above the rest with an industry crowd, and it’s there I’d like to start analyzing the Best Original Song race as we close out this season’s Tech Support profiles of the Academy’s crafts categories with a robust column. The name in question: Ennio Morricone.

You’ll see from the list that Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained” qualified four original songs in the race, and three of them — “100 Black Coffins,” “Freedom” and “Who Did That To You?” — are from artists that might as well be included in the list above (Rick Ross, Anthony Hamilton/Elayna Boynton and John Legend, respectively). And “100 Black Coffins” — a rap song that’s a fun (extreme) longshot at best — would make a unique nomination for Jamie Foxx, who co-wrote the track. But I’m leaning toward a little, meaningful ditty used in the context of the film’s narrative (as all four are) and written by one of the most iconic names in the game of film music composition.

Of course, the Academy has had its chances to award Morricone over the years. He landed Best Original Score nominations for “Days of Heaven,” “The Mission,” “The Untouchables,” “Bugsy” and “Malèna,” but never won a statuette. They finally dealt with the matter via an Honorary Oscar in 2007, but a nomination for “Ancora Qui” from Tarantino’s latest would present the first opportunity in 12 years to recognize him with a competitive award. The song is performed by popular Italian singer/songwriter Elisa Toffoli, who co-wrote it with Morricone. I don’t know if the branch will go for it or not, but if they do, there’s an interesting narrative there.

But I honestly think all of the “Django” songs are worth considering because the overall use of music in the film is quintessentially Tarantino, and well-achieved.

One of the immediate notes about the list of contenders was that Adele’s “Skyfall” from same managed to qualify. This despite the fact that the amazing Bond song samples and builds upon the original Monty Norman theme for the franchise, first heard in 1962’s “Dr. No.” With that, though, I think she’s likely a safe bet for a nomination, and perhaps even our ultimate winner. What Adele and collaborator Paul Epworth did in crafting that track is significant and injects new life into a staple of original songs in film. Though, it’s worth reminding, no Bond song has ever won in this category. “Skyfall” was nominated by both the BFCA and HFPA.

Providing the stiffest competition in the field and a very real threat to win, particularly if the Academy responds resoundingly to the film, is “Suddenly” from Tom Hooper’s adaptation of the musical “Les Misérables.” The only tune written specifically for the film (by the stage production’s original songwriting team of Claude-Michel Schönberg, Alain Boublil and Herbert Kretzmer), it was conceived out of Hooper’s thematic ideas for the material and is performed by lead actor Hugh Jackman. It has a couple of angles on the gold: it could easily come along for a sweep or simply be a consolation prize for the film itself, should “Les Misérables” fall to other frontrunners elsewhere. “Suddenly” was also nominated by both the HFPA and BFCA.

Potential Best Picture nominee “Life of Pi” also has a song in the mix, and it’s a beautiful one used effectively in the film as an extension of Mychael Danna’s lovely score. “Pi’s Lullaby,” composed by Danna and performed by Indian Carnatic vocalist Bombay Jayashri, is just the sort of flavorful addition the music branch is known for embracing. It plays through the film’s opening credits and would make for a great Oscar moment on the show (as would those already mentioned), should the producers elect to keep that element of the telecast.

Speaking of potential great Oscar moments… The documentary “Paul Williams Still Alive” somehow missed the cut when that category was whittled down to 15 finalists recently, but it is, well, still alive in the Best Original Song category. “Still Alive” is a closing credits track, but it’s such a thematically relevant addition to the film, which details the life and times of Academy Award-winning singer/songwriter Paul Williams in a unique and personal way. That’s right, Williams already has an Oscar somewhere (for the Barbra Streisand song “Evergreen” from 1976’s “A Star is Born”), with five other nominations besides. He is widely respected amongst his peers and should definitely be seen as a possibility here, and who wouldn’t like to see him take the stage at the Dolby to perform and remind that, indeed, he hasn’t gone anywhere? “Still Alive” was nominated by the BFCA.

(Fun fact: “Ancora Qui” means “Still Here” in Italian. So we could get a nominations slate including “Still Here” and “Still Alive.”)

Animated films are often enough films to watch in this field, and Pixar’s “Brave” has a pair of contenders it would like the Academy to consider. Either “Learn Me Right” (from Mumford and Sons with Birdy) and “Touch the Sky” (from Julie Fowlis) could make the cut, if not both. Each is also used within the context of the narrative, which helps because of the practice of viewing the contenders’ usage in their respective films. Songs from “Delhi Safari,” “Ice Age: Continental Drift,” “The Lorax,” “Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted,” “Rise of the Guardians” and “Wreck-It Ralph” were also qualified, but seem less likely to resonate. However, Karen O’s heartwarming “Strange Love,” which plays over the closing credits of Tim Burton’s “Frankenweenie,” is a handsome dark horse. “Learn Me Right” was nominated by the BFCA.

Two of the films from Peter Jackson’s “Lord of the Rings” trilogy managed nominations for Best Original Song, with Annie Lennox’s “Into the West” taking the gold as part of “The Return of the King”‘s clean sweep in 2003. (Though somehow the best of the lot — Emiliana Torrini’s “Gollum’s Song” from “The Two Towers” — was snubbed entirely. Go figure.) So it stands to reason that “Song of the Lonely Mountain” from Jackson’s “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” is in the conversation. And indeed, it’s a haunting track, adding on to Tolkien’s words to produce the film’s Neil Finn-performed closing credits song. (The actual words from the book, less the added material, are used as a separate version of the song sung by the dwarfs in the film.) It’s an organic extension of the previous trilogy’s music, as is the film’s aesthetic, so maybe nostalgia kicks in, too.

“Les Misérables” isn’t the only musical in the mix this year, by the way. There are a few others, and boasting a trio of hopefuls is Todd Graff’s choir drama “Joyful Noise.” “From Here to the Moon and Back” comes during a more intimate moment in the film, “He’s Everything” is the big finale and “I’m Yours” is an up-tempo closing credits track. Elsewhere there’s the comic relief of “Undercover Love,” written originally for the musical adaptation “Rock of Ages,” Jordin Sparks’ soulful, R. Kelly-penned ditty “One Wing” from “Sparkle” and even Katy Perry, who tosses her hat into the ring with “Wide Awake” from the concert doc “Katy Perry: Part of Me.” None are likely but “From Here to the Moon and Back” has a fair shot, I suppose.

And then there’s something like “Brooklyn Brothers Beat the Best.” A few years back, indie “Once” (with, admittedly, a more robust campaign behind it) managed to assert itself in this category. This one isn’t really a great film, but since voters will just watch the clips featuring the qualifying songs, maybe tunes like “Airport,” “Come on Girl” and/or “Someday” could be surprises. Who wouldn’t get a kick out of seeing a guitar, kazoo, accordion and Playschool xylophone combine to make a lovely little song in a moving car?

A couple of other songs are used in the narrative that are worth mentioning here, I think. First there’s “Ladies of Tampa,” an inclusion that brought a smile to my face. I had forgotten Matthew McConaughey’s solo strumming ditty used as prelude (and foil) to some naughty bump and grind in Steven Soderbergh’s “Magic Mike.” It would certainly be a sight to see McConaughey perform that one on the show. It might have as good a chance or better as Fiona Apple’s “Dull Tool,” which, with its unique rhythm and structure, plays over the climax of Judd Apatow’s comedy “This is 40.”

There are also three more closing credits songs worth considering, and I’ll start with Keith Urban’s “For You” from “Act of Valor.” It received nominations from both the BFCA and the HFPA, largely due to a pretty committed campaign behind it. It’s a nice enough song for the film (which stars active duty U.S. Navy soldiers), but seems unlikely to register with Oscar voters to me. Jon Bon Jovi’s “Not Running Anymore,” meanwhile, from the geriatric crime flick “Stand Up Guys,” is lovely and was nominated by the HFPA. But it seems just as unlikely. Then there is “Before My Time,” from the stunning documentary “Chasing Ice.” It’s performed by actress Scarlett Johansson, so that gives it an added bit of exposure, but, again, it seems unlikely to pierce through.

I’ll close out with a few stragglers worth mentioning, given the star component of the list. Both Florence + the Machine’s “Breath of Life” from “Snow White and the Huntsman” and Arcade Fire’s “Abraham’s Daughter” from “The Hunger Games” are closing credits songs on summer and spring blockbusters respectively. They’re the kinds of songs that got nominated all the time in the 1980s and 1990s, but haven’t found as much traction as the branch has shifted its process. (And regarding “The Hunger Games,” Taylor Swift’s “Safe & Sound” was nominated by the HFPA but is ineligible for Oscar due to its being the second cue during the closing credits.) But they come from big-time musicians and so awareness will be high.

And that’s how I see the field for now. Granted, I haven’t heard a fair number of the songs on the list. So it’s entirely possible something rises up from the bog. But whatever happens, you can keep track of the category throughout the season at the Best Original Song Contenders page.

What do you think will be nominated in this category? Have your say in the comments section below.

Looks like the debate over the depiction of torture in “Zero Dark Thirty” isn’t going to end any time soon. Three US senators, all in positions concerning national security, have taken it upon themselves to dismiss the film’s portrayal is “grossly inaccurate and misleading” in an open letter to Sony Pictures chairman Michael Lynton. “‘Zero Dark Thirty’ is factually inaccurate,” they write, “and we believe that you have an obligation to state that the role of torture in the hunt for Usama (sic) bin Laden is not based on facts, but rather part of the film’s fictional narrative,” They further accuse the film of having “the potential to shape American public opinion in a disturbing and misleading manner.” There is plenty to counter in such claims — both regarding the events on screen and their relative fictional status — so I expect this conversation to continue. [Variety]

“Compliance” star and Best Supporting Actress hopeful Ann Dowd is following Linda Cardellini this season in footing the bill for her own Oscar campaign. All the more reason to root for her. [THR]

The director and producer of Oscar-shortlisted doc “Bully” will receive the Stanley Kramer Award for social consciousness at the Producers’ Guild Awards next month. [Screen]

What do you think is the year’s most unfairly overlooked film? Katey Rich and Eric Eisenberg round up a dozewn to consider, from “Lawless” to “Cosmopolis.” (My candidate? “Mirror Mirror.”) [Cinema Blend]

Melena Ryzik talks to a number of hopefuls in a crowded Best Supporting Actor race that still seems far from settled. [The Carpetbagger]

Steve Pond does some mathematical simulation voodoo to come up with the projection that there will be eight Best Picture nominees in January. Still, that’s the number he arrived at last year. [The Wrap]

Clayton Davis looks at a number of “fifth spots” seemingly up for grabs in most categories in this year’s Oscar race. [Awards Circuit]

Michelle Paradis talks to Spanish costume designer Paco Delgado about his work on “Les Miserables.” (Incidentally, his designs for Spanish Oscar submission “Blancanieves” are pretty great.) [Below the Line]

Bret Easton Ellis has issued an apology to Kathryn Bigelow for his disparaging comments about her supposed gender advantage. I’m sure that means the world to her. [The Guardian]

The internet was abuzz a few months back when what turned out to be an overzealous report put Ben Affleck in the driver’s seat of the planned Warner Bros. team-up film “Justice League.” The report was soon enough shot down and everyone went about their business, but in a recent interview about his work on “Argo,” Affleck said he hated talking about it in the media at all because the eventual stories shed a negative light on the project.

“I just want to make it clear because it”s not like I had something to even pass on,” he said. “Because someone will eventually do ‘Justice League’ and they’ll go, like, ‘Ben Affleck passed on it,’ and it won’t be true. So I don”t mind setting the record straight. It’s one of those things where the closest I came was some people talked to me about it like at a meeting. They were like, ‘Here’s the stuff we”re doing,’ you know? ‘Here”s what we’re looking at.’ That kind of thing. And they suggested it. But I don”t think there”s a script. I don”t think there”s anything.”

Nevertheless, he’s excited about the potential for “Justice League,” as he’s said since the rumor hit. And he’s equally impressed by what Marvel has accomplished with separate franchises leading into a successful team-up in “The Avengers,” which became third-highest grossing film of all time this year.

“I think there”s a DC ‘Avengers’ that could be done because they have the characters for it,” he said. “And there”s some stuff in the comics now that”s kind of interesting, and it”s cool. That’s what Marvel does so well. They do a lot of things well, but one of the things that I”m really impressed by is how they coordinated all those movies. I mean, you never see somebody make a whole movie with the eye of, like, building it into new sequels, but that’s because you’re just hoping it”s a hit and you”ll do it again.

“But for shooting these kind of satellite movies with the notion that later on you”ll build the planet that they’re orbiting around, and coordinating it all ahead of time, and imagining how the story’s going to work and flow with Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, it”s a big deal. You don’t see that level of organization much in movies. You know what I mean? It’s like enough to just get one movie together and off the ground.”

Affleck also said he wouldn’t be averse to taking on such a daunting genre project in the future. He may have kept things dialed-down on adult dramas like “Gone Baby Gone,” “The Town” and “Argo” so far in his career as a director, but he said he responds to the same things in all projects, whatever the scope. And if the right combination of that popped up in a genre film, he’d leap at the opportunity.

“I would love it,” he said. “My interest is really just in, you know, if I like the characters and if the stories seem smart and surprise me. The things that people look for. So those things exist in the superhero genre. And when they do, I think it”s really exciting. I think they exist in the science-fiction genre. If you look at ‘Blade Runner’ to ‘Alien’ to ‘Aliens’ on down through today. So it”s just about finding a good script, honestly. I wouldn”t be into something or not based on the genre.”

NEW YORK — When he made his way into the director’s chair for a new phase in his career, Ben Affleck always assumed that if he came across an existing script, he would likely just take over and re-write it. And of course, he has the credentials: an Oscar for co-writing “Good Will Hunting” with Matt Damon goes a long way toward legitimizing his talent as a writer. But when “Argo” was fired across his bow by Smoke House honchos Grant Heslov and George Clooney, that wasn’t the case.

“I said, ‘Look, I think the script is kind of close to perfect and I”m just going to do it,'” he recalls alongside screenwriter Chris Terrio after a well-timed, Academy member-attended luncheon at the Four Seasons Restaurant. “I will never have a script that’s this close to just, ‘I”ll shoot it today.’ I remember telling my agent that; I was like, ‘We could shoot this tomorrow. It’s basically finished.’ And I doubt that will happen again. It”s just so rare.”

Terrio had picked up the assignment through Smoke House after an article in Wired Magazine sparked interest. What was intriguing to him was that it was an opportunity to put “almost this shameful taboo” of Iran back on the table as a topic of conversation. It had a bearing on the zeitgeist, but there had been a kind of curtain that descended on Iran after the 1979 Iran Hostage Crisis, he says, not just because of the extremist government but even in the national conversation about it. He felt this material brought those elements back out.

“The national conversation about Iran is always about nukes, about a crazy speech that Ahmadinejad makes at the U.N.,” Terrio says. “There isn”t a more considered discussion of the fact that we’re still in the same place that we were, diplomatically speaking, in 1980.”

But no one quite knew what the movie would be. Was it a comedy? It certainly had those elements. Was it something narratively or tonally complex, like “Syriana?” It wasn’t clear what approach to take. Terrio had an idea of the three worlds depicted in the story — that of the CIA in Washington, the lunacy of Hollywood and, of course, the exotic world of Iran — and so that’s the thematic structure he pitched.

“The other interesting thing about this story is that it’s a significant moment in news as well as a moment in history,” he said just an hour earlier to attendees of the luncheon in a Q&A that included Affleck, production designer Sharon Seymour, actor Victor Garber (who stars as Canadian ambassador Ken Taylor in the film) and real-life hero Tony Mendez (who Affleck plays in the film). “That is to say, satellite technology was new and suddenly these images are being beamed all over the world instantly. So it was important for us that things like the televisions that are constantly on in the film, it was more than just ways of sneaking in exposition. It was important that in the DNA of this story should be ways in which the story is told, and the representation of this story, because the students in Iran know that they’re telling the story. They know that these images that they’re putting in front of the cameras are being beamed all over the world. That began to resonate with the Hollywood stuff, which is not only understanding historical context but understanding the way that it’s represented. And in fact, the way they’re representing history creates history.”

It was a wide-ranging sort of story that demanded some tinkering in order to bring it in as a movie. The places where Terrio composited or changed anything were purely for those purposes, he says, for narrative compression and allowing the story to deliver in two hours. The stew itself was broad and all-encompassing, so the “sins of omission” were felt more than anything.

“Because pretty much any topic that we were interested in is in someway encompassed in this story,” he says. “It touches upon all these worlds in quite a natural way. I mean, we weren’t extending octopus tentacles to get ourselves into a discussion about Carter in the primary in the White House. That was a real thing that was going on at the time with Hamilton Jordan. We weren”t extending tentacles to be able to stage the juxtaposition of press conferences in Hollywood and in Iran. All these images that are in the film are really things that were in the DNA of the story.”

So there were a lot of ideas bubbling in the pot and Terrio stirred them all together and came up with “Argo.” And in Affleck, Smoke House had found a director uniquely suited to the material.

Years ago, when he was living on Hill Street in Eagle Rock, just northeast of downtown Los Angeles, seeking out parts, toiling away on scripts (one of which, the aforementioned “Good Will Hunting,” would ignite his and Damon’s careers), Affleck attended Occidental College for a time. While there, he majored in Middle Eastern Studies, not all that popular at a time when others were taking Soviet studies and the like, aiming for political science jobs. His mother always wanted him to go to college, which was part of the drive, but he also felt that an educated actor or an educated director was bound to be better at his job.

“I was interested in it because I thought it was sort of unknowable, this mysterious place that is somehow at the root of so much conflict,” Affleck says. “And it was something that I didn”t understand. I had this immature notion that there was, you know, what is it, ‘flying carpets and snake charmers’ [a line from the film]. But once I got into it, I got really interested in it for whatever reason. And I felt like I had been sort of built by chance as being totally right for this movie because I am really interested in all these separate things.

“I’m also interested in the complexity of the idea that everybody has their reason, their side of the story. Palestine and Israel, that’s a place where you have two people with really diametrically opposed points of view. And yet both firmly believe they”re not just right but righteous. And that dynamic, I think, is at the root of drama. That”s why you never make a bad guy mustache-twisting. The bad guy thinks he”s in effect the good guy. Or at least he thinks he has good reasons for doing what he is doing. So I think that my attraction to drama, dramatic literature and doing theater and film can be related to what”s at the heart of studying Middle Eastern studies, at least for me.”

So with the right credentials and a “perfect” screenplay in place, it was off to make “Argo.” The mission was declassified by the government in 1997 and really made its way out via the Wired article 10 years later, so Mendez was available to consult, as well as five of the six “houseguests” who were rescued. And the CIA gave some nominal help, but how much? After all, as someone at the luncheon noted, there is a card at the end of the film that seemingly absolves the organization of cooperation.

“It says ‘The CIA doesn’t endorse this movie,’ essentially,” Affleck told the crowd. “Even though they granted us some degree of access, it’s their way of saying, ‘Don’t think that this represents our view in any way.’ They both accepted us and repudiated us, which I feel is very like the CIA.”

But while everything was clicking and looked great on paper, there were a few wrinkles Affleck needed to iron out. One of the key elements of the story is its shift in tone, from the sincere danger of the crisis in Iran to the seemingly satirical (if only it weren’t true) take on 1970s Hollywood. A colorful assortment permeated the latter, including a composite producer (played by Alan Arkin), who would help launch the faux-film “Argo” as cover for the operation, and Oscar-winning makeup artist John Chambers (John Goodman), who was a civilian CIA consultant.

“I thought they worked fluidly in the script, but of course, on paper, it’s kind of easier to mask some of the incongruities that may exist tonally or visually or what have you,” Affleck said during the luncheon. “So I was quite concerned. I constructed a lot of these transitions so as to hopefully kind of knit it together. And then what happened was when John and Alan showed up, the scenes didn’t feel funny in that comic way, ‘Ha, ha,’ or they didn’t feel funny in the way that you sort of say, ‘All right, we’re not going to take reality seriously.’ They felt like two people saying things that they would genuinely say.”

In both cases, he says choosing the actors for those roles was kind of a no-brainer. For starters, Arkin’s dry sense of humor and no-nonsense attitude seemed tailor-made for the producer, leading the actor to even joke with Affleck about the obvious nature of the casting decision. “He really has that aura of a guy who”s just done enough and accomplished enough,” Affleck says. “He knows himself well enough and is old enough where he just doesn”t care about impressing anybody or changing his behavior at all to meet other people”s expectations. And I think he enjoys that. He was kind of the ultimate choice.”

John Goodman, meanwhile, actually bears a physical resemblance to Chambers, which made that decision even easier. “When you look at the picture and you look at John, and you think of their sensibilities there and the movies they have done, I don”t know how much credit I should get for casting because it”s so obvious,” Affleck says. “It was just a question of getting them; it wasn”t a question of who it should be.”

In hammering out a visual look, Affleck concedes he stands on the shoulders of giants. Craftspeople like Seymour, who was tasked with steeping the film in period without calling overt attention to that, or DP Rodrigo Prieto, who would discuss at a post-screening Q&A a few days later the various film tests he went through to produce the distressed look that Affleck liked — they are a huge reason for the success of “Argo” on a visual level.

Affleck looked to films like “The Verdict” and “Three Days of the Condor” for cues, “The Parallax View” as well. And like another CIA film that’s hitting theaters this season, “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Argo” owes plenty to “All the President’s Men.”

“It was mentioned in the script and when I saw it mentioned in the script I really took it and kind of ran with it,” Affleck says of Alan J. Pakula’s 1976 film. “I looked at how it was shot and I learned a lot. There was a use of wide shots that was different. They used diopters to give the room more depth, which we did in a couple other scenes. They kind of kept the camera on a dolly for that stuff and I don”t know if that was intentional or not but I thought that would be a good counterweight to the handheld stuff for Iran. And I really liked the color palette and the way that it seemed to be very sort of expansive, even though it was interiors. And the acting was just magnificent.”

But for all the talk of formalism, it was important to Affleck that the film’s visuals always connect on a human level. While he and Terrio weren’t afraid of structure, they also wanted to leave the film room to breathe.

“Ben keeps bringing it back to this humanist thing where you just keep landing on the faces of people, whether they”re the actors or whether they”re the extras,” Terrio says. “And I think that when you’ve carefully thought out a structure, it”s important to keep finding the little messy edges, the places where the edges fray a bit. And I think Ben does that. Constantly, right up to the end, you never feel like you”re going through some sort of direct linear structure, because it keeps trying to elbow its way out in any number of scenes. Things like the bazaar, where it suddenly feels like this strange belly of the beast that you”re going into structurally, and yet when you”re watching the scene it just feels like this dynamic, alive organism.”

It was all part and parcel of creating a vast mixture that might seem on the surface to be simplistic or just straight-forward as a thriller, but underneath, has plenty on its mind.

“I feel that if you could encapsulate your movie in a sentence you probably shouldn”t make it,” Affleck says, “because why not just tell people? But for me, it”s dealing with themes and those themes, if done well, will provoke things in the audience and they take it from there. But, that being said, I do think it’s really interesting, politically speaking, to look at the fact that Iran is our greatest foreign policy concern right now and this is the root of that. I had never seen a movie that’s represented it so cleanly or wanted to deal with it so acutely. It also, I think, reminds people of what sort of connection we all have, and I think that”s important. Because it”s not a movie about making people good guys and bad guys. I think ultimately, like Chris said, there is sort of an element of humanism in it that I think is really important. It deals with storytelling, and the power of storytelling.”

“Argo” may still be playing in a theater near you. It lands on DVD/Blu-ray on February 19.

As I mentioned last week, compared to Cannes and Venice, the Berlin Film Festival tends to look like something of a weak sister when it comes to securing major auteur titles. Their festival curtain-raisers, meanwhile, tend to be on the low-key side: while a good film, this year’s opener, “Farewell, My Queen,” wasn’t exactly an event, while “True Grit” was old news by the time it kicked off the 2011 edition.

Both those traditions have been broken in grand style by this morning’s doozy of an announcement. The official festival email slyly mentioned only “Opening Film” in the subject line: upon opening it, I had to blink a few times before believing that, yes, Wong Kar-wai’s long, long delayed “The Grandmaster” will indeed be kicking off the Berlinale with its international premiere on February 7. (It’s an international rather than a world premiere because it’s scheduled for release in China the month before.)

By any standards, this represents a major programming coup: Wong’s lavish-looking martial arts epic, his first feature since 2007’s coolly received “My Blueberry Nights,” has had international cinephiles and genre geeks alike salivating — and often despairing — with every teasing development in its protracted road to fruition.

Rumored for festival premieres as early as 2010, we thought we might finally see it at Cannes last year — until it emerged that the director, famous for his perfectionism, would still be shooting then. For years, Cannes had seemed the likeliest location for its unveiling — Wong’s last four features all premiered in Competition on the Croisette — though the mooted springtime European release schedule seemed to have ruled out a Cannes 2013 date. The director took a three-minute short to Berlin in 2001, but I believe this will be the first time he’s premiered a feature at one of the other European majors.

While “The Grandmaster,” which stars Tony Leung and Ziyi Zhang, is in the official selection, it will not be competing for the Golden Bear. Of course, it’d be rather awkward if it were, given that Wong is this year’s Competition jury president. When that announcement was made back in August, it raised a flicker of hope that Berlin might get the director and his latest work as a kind of package deal, but it seemed no less likely that the film would hold out for a sunnier Competition slot.

Ultimately, the Berlinale won out and I couldn’t be more pleased: this rare A-list addition ought to attract more eyeballs to a festival that often struggles to get the media attention it deserves, even when turning up arthouse gold like “A Separation” and “Tabu.”

Wong states: “I am truly very honoured by Dieter [Kosslick, Berlinale director] and his invitation for my new film ‘The Grandmaster’ to participate in the 63rd Berlinale and to open the festival. This is a dream project for me that I had been developing for many years. I am very happy to be able to present it in Berlin. I was already greatly looking forward to my returning to Berlin to serve as the President of the International Jury, so seeing ‘The Grandmaster’ presented there will make it all the more special for me.”

In other Berlinale news, it was announced that previous festival premieres “Frances Ha,” “Lovelace” and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s directorial debut “Don Jon’s Addiction” will be among the films appearing in the Panorama section. The fest runs from 7 to 17 February and I will, as usual, be in attendance. Bring it on.

Though the film itself can’t seem to catch much of a break in the awards race — those omissions from Oscar’s VFX and makeup shortlists still sting — “The Impossible” star Naomi Watts keeps gathering momentum. After neatly scoring SAG, Globe and BFCA nods last week, the actress now has her own vocal Academy advocate (her Julia Roberts, if you will) in the form of Reese Witherspoon. A public fan letter to Watts from Witherspoon, who is not a close personal friend, compares her performance to those of Meryl Streep in “Sophie’s Choice” and Sally Field in “Norma Rae” (both Oscar winners, as it happens) and declares “The Impossible” “one of the best films I have ever seen in my entire life.” Witherspoon is not the “Impossible” team’s first celebrity cheerleader: Angelina Jolie hosted a screening last month. Is this the tip of the iceberg in terms of actors’ branch support? [EW]

Devin Faraci on why “Zero Dark Thirty” does not endorse torture. Yes to all of this. [Badass Digest] 

More Palm Springs festival honorees: “Life of Pi” composer Mychael Danna gets the Frederick Loewe Award, Tom Hooper the Sonny Bono Visionary Award. (Now there are two names I never expected to type in one sentence.) [LA Times]

So far, the Academy’s new online voting system appears to be progressing without a hitch. [Variety]

Anne Thompson talks to Eddie Redmayne about singing for the first time in 12 years in “Les Mis.” (If you ask me, which you didn’t, he has the best voice in the whole thing.) [Thompson on Hollywood]

“The Master,” which is lately living up to that critics’ pet status many of us assumed it would own this season, tops this year’s Village Voice poll. [Village Voice]

It has to settle for second place, however, in IndieWire’s extensive critics’ poll, where “Holy Motors” (along with star Denis Lavant) takes the gold. [IndieWire] 

Quentin Tarantino talks to Karina Longworth about “Django Unchained,” misconceptions about the film’s edit, and much, much more in a lengthy interview. [Village Voice]

The Berlin Film Festival unveils the official poster for its next edition, which is sooner than you might think. The next two months are going to be fun. [Berlinale]

Alexandre Desplat, who is in the Oscar hunt for “Argo,” “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Rise of the Guardians,” talks about the challenges of scoring the last of these — his first animated feature since “Fantastic Mr. Fox.” [Screen]

With ballots in Academy members hands as of yesterday, the great settling is off and running. Various critics groups and top 10 lists have narrowed the pile enough that voters have a pretty good idea of the landscape in each category. More than that, “frontrunners” have staked their claim on the race, leaving precious little space for dark horses to maneuver.

Then again, even dark horses have their champions. Denis Lavant isn’t likely to get his due recognition for one of the year’s best performances in “Holy Motors,” but at least he’s on the radar. His film, after all, is faring well on the top 10 circuit and he pops up enough on the critics circuit (albeit in the form of a “runner-up”). The same could be said of a few stragglers, the contenders Academy members know are there, they just aren’t getting much of the focus.

But what about those who don’t even get the benefit of an afterglow for also-ran status? What about the truly outside-the-box players that could use a modicum of attention. Well, that’s where we’d like to step in.

Guy and I put our heads together and cooked up a list of 10 performances we feel deserve to at least be on the periphery of the Academy’s attention as they sit down to fill out ballots. No one wants a collective pulled from the same, tired, whittled down pools, so we’re looking to expand those pools again. In some cases it might be a film we feel need only be seen to understand the power of a performance. In others, it might be a performance in a film that’s surely on the radar but might get lost in the shuffle.

In all cases, we’re just looking to beef up the slate. It’s always a good thing to expand horizons, no? So click through the gallery below for a look at our picks, and feel free to offer up your own in the comments section below.

When you’re winning, you’re winning. Daniel Day-Lewis hasn’t missed a stop on the awards circuit so far this season, and the Santa Barbara International Film Festival wasn’t about to be the first. It was announced today that the two-time Oscar champ will receive one of the festival’s loftiest honors, the Montecito Award, both in recognition of his work in “Lincoln” and his career as a whole.

The award, which will be presented to Day-Lewis at a tribute evening on January 26, recognizes “a performer who has given a series of classic and standout performances throughout his/her career,” and has been presented to Annette Bening, Naomi Watts, Javier Bardem, Kate Winslet, Julianne Moore and Geoffrey Rush since its instatement in 2005. I don’t think many would deny that Day-Lewis meets the criteria. 

SBIFF director Roger Durling stated, “Daniel Day-Lewis continues to inspire the industry and the public by his approach to tackling the most complex of characters and delivering brilliant performances time after time. He is indicative of what the Montecito Award represents and we are thrilled to be presenting this to him this year.”

I have to confess, a few months ago, I didn’t believe that Day-Lewis could win his third Oscar this season, however remarkable his Abraham Lincoln turned out to be. As you probably know, nobody has ever won three Best Actor Oscars, much less from a more five nominations — and all before the age of 60. (Just look how much longer they made Meryl Streep wait before granting her Golden Man #3 earlier this year.)

But precedent counts for little when it comes to Day-Lewis, an actor held in higher and more universal esteem than almost any of his peers. Furthermore, his personal mystique and infrequent work rate of late bestows a certain event status upon his screen appearances that may dissipate quickly in the case of a disappointment like “Nine” — but only elevates performances that, like “Lincoln,” live up to their on-paper promise.

Thus far, Day-Lewis has racked up wins from the New York Film Critics’ Circle and Boston Film Critics’ Society, in addition to countless smaller critics’ honors, and is the only name in the race that hasn’t been left off one applicable nominations list or another. It’s not, I believe, that Day-Lewis’s strong work in “Lincoln” is without peer in the field. Earlier in the season, I had entertained notions of either Joaquin Phoenix or John Hawkes taking the lead, but with their narratives (and films) having failed to catch fire, and “Lincoln” an ironclad Best Picture contender, I’m struggling to see any way the British genius doesn’t make history this year. And if any actor at work today should, it’s him.

I also find myself playing hypothetical mind games: if Day-Lewis had won the 2002 Oscar for “Gangs of New York,” as he’d been widely expected to do before Adrien Brody’s upset victory, would he be hurtling just as easily toward his fourth victory this year? Such are the questions that keep an Oscar geek awake at night.    

NEW YORK — As the stage lights dim at the Walter Kerr Theatre, signaling an act break for “The Heiress,” actress Jessica Chastain gets up off the floor and exits stage left. She sniffles back the tears she effortlessly manifested for the previous scene, preparing for the next act. Her character, Catherine, is frail, emotional, precious, and at the end of this act, burdened by the unloving eye of her father and twisted-up passion for a would-be beau. One can’t help but think, “Maya would never be in this position.”

Maya is Chastain’s character in Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty,” a dense and principled account of the hunt for Osama bin Laden. She’s driven, single-minded, seemingly without emotion, save for the tears she can finally shed when her mission is over. It’s a fascinating foil to Catherine, who spends the entirety of “The Heiress” moving to a place of rigid, emotionless resolve. And so while on the stage Chastain is performing a fragile character’s journey of clenching up, strengthening and hardening, on the screen she’s performing a hardened character’s journey of releasing, letting go and softening.

“I think the reason for that is mostly I”m just interested in characters that have a huge arc,” Chastain says a few days later over lunch at the Mercer Hotel. “But it”s interesting also that Catherine is a woman that defines herself completely by men, because she sees herself as her father sees her in the beginning. And then immediately transfers it to her fiancée. Whereas Maya…for her it”s a badge of honor to stand alone. She sees it as this great accomplishment that she”s completely focused on one thing.”

Performing a character like Maya — who is based on a real-life CIA agent whose identity has been kept a secret as she’s still in the field — is much more difficult than performing, say, the colorful Celia Foote in last year’s “The Help” (which netted her an Oscar nomination), Chastain says. But the reward is in the digging, and she confesses a passion for research in that regard.

“I’m playing someone who is trained to be unemotional and analytically precise,” she says. “So it means I can”t follow my instincts. I”ve been trained my whole life to be emotional, be vulnerable, to allow whatever hits me to really affect me, but in really intense interrogation scenes when I”m watching Jason Clarke [waterboarding a subject], my impulse is to really be in it, vulnerable. But I have to then take that and say, ‘Well, how could I take what I’m feeling and not lie about it?’ I have to take it and then go, ‘My training doesn”t let me show exactly how upsetting this is to watch.’ It has to be detailed. I can”t do the same scene 10 different ways.”

It’s a unique character also for its overall lack of backstory or context outside of the events portrayed in the film. Further complicating matters — or perhaps liberating them — is that producer and screenwriter Mark Boal, who researched and interviewed the story extensively, has to protect his sources, even to the actors who are portraying them. If Chastain were playing, say, Marilyn Monroe (who she studied at length for her role in “The Help”), there are hours and hours of footage at her disposal. But the caveat there is in mimicry. “How do I create something,” she ponders of such studies.

“I tried to give Jessica and the other actors an idea of the people involved through the characters they play in the script,” Boal said in an email. “Whenever Jessica had questions about the research behind her character, I tried to give her a general idea of what life was like for people in the CIA, as best as I understood it. But beyond that, I couldn’t draw a dotted line between anyone in the script and anyone in real life because these are civil servants, not public figures.”

So with no access to “Maya” and only a certain amount of context from the producer and director of the film, the danger of mimicry may not have been there, but the challenge to build character was as apparent as ever. Nevertheless, Chastain says she relished the process, however unique, because it played into her own habits as an actress.

“Something that I do share with Maya is I really like research and I really like solving puzzles,” she says. “I would read the script and I found a lot of clues. Like I could take any scene and take one line and go, ‘Well, this line means this about her.’ I have a process: whenever I do a movie, I make a list of everything all the other characters say about my character and everything my character says about herself, and just looking at that list tells you so much about the person you’re playing and how they’re different from you. ‘Washington says she’s a killer.’ That’s something someone says about Maya. ‘A lot of my friends have died trying to do this; I believe I was chosen to finish the job.’ Someone who believes that they were chosen to finish the job — that says a lot about her.”

In addition, the practical details that pepper the script became in-roads into the character in many ways. Chastain recalls one as an example, Maya’s favorite candy — Twizzlers — and how something that small can provide a framework for an inner context. “All these things that call back to this life that Maya then becomes a stranger to, having that there means while we’re in the moment, we can create scenes around it,” she says. “Like that candy scene. There”s no lines or anything, but for me, when we”re filming that, coming in from the market, wearing that black robe, sitting down on the couch, drinking the Diet Coke and eating those Twizzlers, it’s like this contradiction, of the old world and the new world for her.”

She pauses and needlessly apologizes. “Sorry. I talk a lot about acting because I really love it. So if I start talking too long you can just cut me off.”

But that spotlight and, indeed, reliance on the character’s actions above where she comes from or who she is in a contextual sense is in some ways the essence of cinema. “Shakespeare’s even like that,” Chastain’s co-star Jason Clarke said in a separate interview. “The thought is on the line. There’s not subtext; it’s just there in the line. What you say is what you mean and what you mean is what you do…You are the sum of all your actions.”

Which brings us to that single tear by film’s end, and a closing line Chastain has frequently noted as resonant for both the character and the greater themes of the film.

“It’s not just like a propaganda, ‘Go America,’ fist-pumping thing,” she says. “It ends with a question. ‘Where do you want to go?’ And she doesn’t know. There’s an emptiness. And it’s more than just her because it represents us as the audience. Where do we go now that we’ve killed bin Laden?”

Maybe we go into a certain state of reflection. Much has been made of the film’s depiction of torture, leading it to become a political football amongst agenda-driven outlets looking to kick it around. But the depth of its matter-of-fact handling in the script is what resonated for Chastain.

“You see this argument that you don’t expect of someone in the CIA saying, ‘I cannot bring you proof because I can’t do anything without the tools that you’ve taken away from me,'” she says. “When I was reading the script the first time, I was kind of shocked by that because in the press it had been PC to say the opposite. And here you have so many views.  You see how brutal those interrogations were, and then you also see someone fighting for it.”

Another difficult-to-resist narrative with the film is the notion that the story of a woman in a man’s world standing up for herself and spearheading one of the most important intelligence missions in US history is being told by Kathryn Bigelow, a female figure in the largely male-dominated film industry. But Chastain sees it from a more nuanced angle.

“I do see a similarity between Kathryn and Maya in that when you’re on set with Kathryn, you don’t think about her as being a woman,” she says. “You just think about her as being an amazing director. And she’s really good at her job and she never has a speech about the glass ceiling in Hollywood and she never talks about how hard it is to be a woman in Hollywood or in a man’s world. She’s so focused and just does it.

“And the same with Maya. Maya, no matter what she comes up against with her colleagues, primarily who are men, she doesn’t have this speech like, ‘You’re sexist,’ because that takes away from her energy of doing her job well. And I don’t know that Kathryn thinks of herself as fighting for women in a man’s world. We just talked about the idea that here is this incredible character that stands alone, and it’s very rare to see that in a movie, in Hollywood, in America, the female character not being defined by whatever the man was in the film.”

Deeper still, Chastain ponders it as representative of a moment in time. “There are so many women that are choosing not to get married, to take their careers and to stand on their own, which, in our society, is a strange thing. I have people even asking me about it. Like why am I not married? I’m sure more people ask me that than they ask a man my age. There’s this thing about being the bachelorette.

“So of course it’s exciting because this film is bucking all conventions of the typical idea that you would expect with this character. And I think Kathryn’s the only one who could really direct the film like this because even if you had someone else who was so great, they might then give her the speech about the glass ceiling in the CIA.”

Still, Chastain registers a note of sadness at the fact that the real-life Maya can’t be a public element of the story. “Because you want to say, ‘Thank you,’ you know, for the sacrifices she made. It kind of breaks my heart to think this woman went through all of that, fought even with her colleagues and superiors, everything she kind of gave up, a life, for close to a decade, and she can’t get credit for it.”

But “Zero Dark Thirty,” she says, is the least she and those involved can do to pay tribute.

“Zero Dark Thirty” opens in limited release tomorrow.

“Zero Dark Thirty” remains on top of the critics awards haul today with another Best Picture nod, this time from the Austin Film Critics Association. Oddly, though, the film won nothing else. “The Master” seemed to be more of a favorite, taking Best Director, Best Actor and Best Cinematography. Check out the full list of winners below and, well, you know — The Circuit.

Top 10
1. “Zero Dark Thirty”
2. “Argo”
3. “Moonrise Kingdom”
4. “Django Unchained”
5. “Cloud Atlas”
6. “Holy Motors”
7. “Beasts of the Southern Wild”
8. “The Master”
9. “Silver Linings Playbook”
10. “Looper”

Best Director
Paul Thomas Anderson, “The Master”

Best Actor
Joaquin Phoenix, “The Master”

Best Actress
Jennifer Lawrence, “Silver Linings Playbook”

Best Supporting Actor
Christoph Waltz, “Django Unchained”

Best Supporting Actress
Anne Hathaway, “Les Misérables”

Best Adapted Screenplay
“Argo”

Best Original Screenplay
“Looper”

Best Cinematography
“The Master”

Best Score
“Cloud Atlas”

Best Animated Film
“Wreck-It Ralph”

Best Foreign Language Film
“Holy Motors”

Best Documentary
“The Imposter”

Best First Film
“Beasts of the Southern Wild”

Best Austin Film
“Bernie”

Breakthrough Artist Award
Quvenzhané Wallis, “Beasts of the Southern Wild”

Special Honorary Award
Matthew McConaughey, “Bernie,” “Killer Joe,” “Magic Mike” and “The Paperboy”

After sitting idly by and watching films like “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Argo” reap most of the critics’ Best Picture awards, Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” finally has one of its own, from the Dallas-Ft. Worth Film Critics Association. The film won Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress in addition to Best Picture, but fell to Kathryn Bigelow in the Best Director category. Check out the full list (ranked through runners-up) below, and keep track of the season via The Circuit.

Best Picture
1. “Lincoln”
2. “Argo”
3. “Zero Dark Thirty”
4. “Life of Pi”
5. “Les Misérables”
6. “Moonrise Kingdom”
7. “Silver Linings Playbook”
8. “Skyfall”
9. “The Master”
10. “Beasts of the Southern Wild”

Best Director
1. Kathryn Bigelow, “Zero Dark Thirty”
2. Steven Spielberg, “Lincoln”
3. Ben Affleck, “Argo”
4. Ang Lee, “Life of Pi”
5. Wes Anderson, “Moonrise Kingdom”

Best Actor
1. Daniel Day-Lewis, “Lincoln”
2. Joaquin Phoenix, “The Master”
3. John Hawkes, “The Sessions”
4. Hugh Jackman, “Les Misérables”
5. Denzel Washington, “Flight”

Best Actress
1. Jessica Chastain, “Zero Dark Thirty”
2. Jennifer Lawrence, “Silver Linings Playbook”
3. Emmanuelle Riva, “Amour”
4. Quvenzhané Wallis, “Beasts of the Southern Wild”
5. Naomi Watts, “The Impossible”

Best Supporting Actor
1. Tommy Lee Jones, “Lincoln”
2. Philip Seymour Hoffman, “The Master”
3. Christoph Waltz, “Django Unchained”
4. Alan Arkin, “Argo”
5. Robert De Niro, “Silver Linings Playbook”

Best Supporting Actress
1. Sally Field, “Lincoln”
2. Anne Hathaway, “Les Misérables”
3. Amy Adams, “The Master”
4. Helen Hunt, “The Sessions”
5. Ann Dowd, “Compliance”

Best Screenplay
1. “Zero Dark Thirty”
2. “Django Unchained”

Best Cinematography
1. “Life of Pi”
2. “Skyfall”

Best Animated Film
1. “ParaNorman”
2. “Frankenweenie”
3. “The Pirates! Band of Misfits”

Best Foreign Language Film
1. “Amour”
2. “A Royal Affair”
3. “The Intouchables”
4. “Holy Motors”
5. “The Kid with a Bike”

Best Documentary
1. “Searching for Sugar Man”
2. “Bully”
3. “How to Survive a Plague”
4. “West of Memphis”
5. “The Invisible War”

Russell Smith Award (for best low-budget or cutting-edge independent film)
“Beasts of the Southern Wild”

The Florida Film Critics Circle has joined a recent build for Ben Affleck’s “Argo” in the critics awards circuit, handing the film Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay honors. Daniel Day-Lewis and Jessica Chastain added to their lead actor and actress haul, while Philip Seymour Hoffman and Anne Hathaway were singled out in the supporting ranks. Check out the full list of winners below, and keep track of the season via The Circuit.

Best Picture
“Argo”

Best Director
Ben Affleck, “Argo”

Best Actor
Daniel Day-Lewis, “Lincoln”

Best Actress
Jessica Chastain, “Zero Dark Thirty”

Best Supporting Actor
Philip Seymour Hoffman, “The Master”

Best Supporting Actress
Anne Hathaway, “Les Misérables”

Best Adapted Screenplay
“Argo”

Best Original Screenplay
“Looper”

Best Art Direction/Production Design
“Anna Karenina”

Best Cinematography
“Skyfall”

Best Visual Effects
“Life of Pi”

Best Animated Film
“Frankenweenie”

Best Foreign Language Film
“The Intouchables”

Best Documentary
“The Queen of Versailles”

Pauline Kael Breakout Award
Quvenzhané Wallis, “Beasts of the Southern Wild”

The London Film Critics’ Circle joined their American counterparts today in announcing their nominations, and I think they did rather a good job. Then again, I would say that: I’m one of the voters. And it’s pretty clear which films we responded to most as a collective: Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master” and Michael Haneke’s “Amour” handily lead the field with seven nominations each, including a trio of acting nods apiece.

A number of US critics’ favorites, however, fell short: “Lincoln” was confined to the acting categories alone, while “Zero Dark Thirty” managed nods for Best Director, Screenplay and Actress, but just missed out in the Film of the Year category, which was filled out with “Argo,” “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “Life of Pi.” (It’s perhaps coincidental but nonetheless interesting that both are dramas centered very much on US political concerns — are Brits simply less invested? It’ll be interesting to see how BAFTA respond.) 

Local hopeful “Les Miserables,” meanwhile, could only manage a place in the secondary British Film of the Year field, though Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway and Samantha Barks (in the Young Performer category) were all mentioned. 

As the robust showing for “Amour” demonstrates, the London crowd are friendlier than most to foreign-language film, as “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia” helmer Nuri Bilge Ceylan was nominated alongside Haneke in the Director of the Year category, while “The Hunt” leading man Mads Mikkelsen (though, to my disappointment, no Denis Lavant) cracked the Actor of the Year lineup.

Other unusual picks I’m proud to have had a hand in include Michael Fassbender’s Supporting Actor nod for “Prometheus,” Isabelle Huppert in the corresponding category for “Amour,” “Tabu” in a sterling foreign-language field, and a Young Performer bid for the hugely promising Irish newcomer Jack Reynor in the little-seen “What Richard Did.” Plus, days after its dismaying Academy shut-out, the makeup work in “Holy Motors” received a mention in the mixed-discipline lineup for Technical Achievement of the Year, selected by the Circle’s smaller awards committee.  

The winners will be announced at a ceremony at London’s Mayfair Hotel on January 20. Full list of nominees below, plus everything else at The Circuit.

Film of the Year
“Amour”
“Argo”
“Beasts of the Southern Wild”
“Life of Pi”
“The Master”

Foreign Language Film of the Year
“Amour”
“Holy Motors”
“Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”
“Rust and Bone”
“Tabu”

British Film of the Year
“Berberian Sound Studio”
“The Imposter”
“Les Miserables”
“Sightseers”
“Skyfall”

Documentary of the Year
“The Imposter”
“London: The Modern Babylon”
“Nostalgia for the Light”
“The Queen of Versailles”
“Searching for Sugar Man”

Director of the Year
Michael Haneke, “Amour”
Ang Lee, “Life of Pi”
Paul Thomas Anderson, “The Master”
Nuri Bilge Ceylan, “Once Upon a Time in Anatolia”
Kathryn Bigelow, “Zero Dark Thirty”

Actor of the Year
Daniel Day-Lewis, “Lincoln”
Hugh Jackman, “Les Miserables”
Mads Mikkelsen, “The Hunt”
Joaquin Phoenix, “The Master”
Jean-Louis Trintignant, “Amour”

Actress of the Year
Jessica Chastain, “Zero Dark Thirty”
Marion Cotillard, “Rust and Bone”
Helen Hunt, “The Sessions”
Jennifer Lawrence, “Silver Linings Playbook”
Emmanuelle Riva, “Amour”

British Actor of the Year
Daniel Craig, “Skyfall”
Charlie Creed-Miles, “Wild Bill”
Daniel Day-Lewis, “Lincoln”
Toby Jones, “Berberian Sound Studio”
Steve Oram, “Sightseers”

British Actress of the Year
Emily Blunt, “Looper” and “Your Sister’s Sister”
Judi Dench, “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel” and “Skyfall”
Alice Lowe, “Sightseers”
Helen Mirren, “Hitchcock”
Andrea Riseborough, “Shadow Dancer”

Supporting Actor of the Year
Alan Arkin, “Argo”
Javier Bardem, “Skyfall”
Michael Fassbender, “Prometheus”
Philip Seymour Hoffman, “The Master”
Tommy Lee Jones, “Lincoln”

Supporting Actress of the Year
Amy Adams, “The Master”
Judi Dench, “Skyfall”
Sally Field, “Lincoln”
Anne Hathaway, “Les Miserables”
Isabelle Huppert, “Amour”

Screenwriter of the Year
Michael Haneke, “Amour”
Chris Terrio, “Argo”
Quentin Tarantino, “Django Unchained”
Paul Thomas Anderson, “The Master”
Mark Boal, “Zero Dark Thirty”

Breathrough British Filmmaker of the Year
Ben Drew (writer/director), “Ill Manors”
Bart Layton (director), “The Imposter”
Sally El Hosaini (writer/director), “My Brother the Devil”
Steve Oram and Alice Lowe (writers), “Sightseers”
Dexter Fletcher (co-writer/director), “Wild Bill”

Young British Performer of the Year
Samantha Barks, “Les Miserables”
Fady Elsayed, “My Brother the Devil”
Tom Holland, “The Impossible”
Will Poulter, “Wild Bill”
Jack Reynor, “What Richard Did”

Technical Achievement of the Year
Jacqueline Durran (costume design), “Anna Karenina”
William Goldenberg (film editing), “Argo”
Ben Richardson (cinematography), “Beasts of the Southern Wild”
Joakim Sundstrom and Stevie Haywood (sound design), “Berberian Sound Studio”
Bernard Floch (makeup), “Holy Motors”
Claudio Miranda (cinematography), “Life of Pi”
Bill Westenhofer (visual effects), “Life of Pi”
Jack Fisk and David Crank (production design), “The Master”
David Raedeker (cinematography), “My Brother the Devil”
Alexandre Desplat (music), “Rust and Bone”

As you’d expect from a city boasting one of the world’s major film festivals, the Toronto Film Critics Association is one of the most discerning and unconventional groups on the block, and so they’ve again proved with their 2012 picks. Continuing its recent mini-run of critics’ prizes, “The Master” takes another Best Picture prize, also nabbing Best Director, Screenplay and Supporting Actor for Philip Seymour Hoffman.

Meanwhile, after several runner-up citations, “Holy Motors” dynamo Denis Lavant finally gets a Best Actor award to call his own, while “The Deep Blue Sea” star Rachel Weisz claims a bookend to her NYFCC trophy. The Toronto crowd really showed their independent colors, however, in the Best Supporting Actress race, where Gina Gershon got her first mention of the season for her gutsy work in “Killer Joe.” O Canada, we stand in awe of thee. Full list of winners after the jump, and, you know, at The Circuit.

Best Picture
“The Master” (Runners-up: “Amour,” “Zero Dark Thirty”)

Best Director
Paul Thomas Anderson, “The Master” (Runners-up: Kathryn Bigelow, “Zero Dark Thirty”; Leos Carax, “Holy Motors”)

Best Actor
Denis Lavant, “Holy Motors” (Runners-up: Daniel Day-Lewis, “Lincoln”; Joaquin Phoenix, “The Master”)

Best Actress
Rachel Weisz, “The Deep Blue Sea” (Runners-up: Jessica Chastain, “Zero Dark Thirty”; Emmanuelle Riva, “Amour”)

Best Supporting Actor
Philip Seymour Hoffman, “The Master” (Runners-up: Javier Bardem, “Skyfall”; Tommy Lee Jones, “Lincoln”)

Best Supporting Actress
Gina Gershon, “Killer Joe” (Runners-up: Amy Adams, “The Master”; Ann Dowd, “Compliance”; Anne Hathaway, “Les Miserables”)

Best Screenplay
“The Master” (Runners-up: “Lincoln,” “Zero Dark Thirty”)

Best Foreign Language Film
“Amour” (Runners-up: “Holy Motors,” “Tabu”)

Best Animated Feature
“ParaNorman” (Runners-up: “Brave,” “Frankenweenie”)

Best Documentary
“Stories We Tell” (Runners-up: “The Queen of Versailles,” “Searching for Sugar Man”)

Best First Feature
(TIE) Benh Zeitlin, “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and Panos Cosmatos, “Beyond the Black Rainbow” (Runner-up: Drew Goddard, “The Cabin in the Woods”)

Best Canadian Film (finalists)
“Stories We Tell” (Runners-up: “Bestiaire,” “Goon”)

I’m not sure of Steve Pond’s assertion that the adapted screenplay race is significantly “more crowded and competitive” than the original one this year, but I do like his point that judging adaptations can entail a different set of considerations than with originals (one reason I think the Academy gets it right, where many other awards don’t, with separate categories). This year’s crop, he suggests, “should be judged the same way diving competitions are: with one score for how artful the film is, the other for the degree of difficulty.” With several films this year taking on source material once widely tagged with the “unfilmable” label, from “Cloud Atlas” to “On the Road” to “Lie of Pi,” Pond talks to the screenwriters who gave the lie to that curious adjective. [The Wrap] 

Meanwhile, Sasha Stone examines what she sees as the top contenders for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar. [Awards Daily]

To stick with the screenplay theme, Nathan Fillion has been tapped to host the Writers’ Guild Awards in LA next month. [The Race]

A.O. Scott declares 10 films too few to represent the class of 2012, expanding his list to 25 — topped by “Amour.” [New York Times]

A look at the recording sessions of Howard Shore’s “The Hobbit” score with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. [The Guardian]

The premiere of “Jack Reacher” and the post-premiere party for “Django Unchained” are among the events that have been postponed or cancelled in the wake of the Newtown tragedy. [Variety]

Historian Jim Downs considers the arguments for and against “Lincoln”‘s depiction of abolition, accusing the film of ignoring economic motivations. [Huffington Post]

Nathaniel Rogers vents his frustration over the negative reviews for his beloved “Les Misérables,” though he acknowledges it’s not without flaws — and then examines the weak spots in other Best Picture frontrunners this year. [The Film Experience]  

Another hat-tip to Nathaniel for digging up a link to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s storyboards for his abandoned adaptation of “Life of Pi.” Do you wish we’d seen his version, or are you glad Ang Lee took the reins? [Jean-Pierre Jeunet]

Presumably in honor of “This Is 40” and/or “Amour,” a list of the best works — not all of them cinematic — about the panicky perils of ageing. [The A.V. Club] 

The Southeastern Film Critics’ Association have thrown their favorites in the mix, and there remains a pleasing lack of consensus between these groups in the Best Picture department. “Argo” notches up another win here, also taking wins for Best Director and Screenplay. Oscar favorites Daniel Day-Lewis and Jennifer Lawrence add to their already groaning trophy cabinets, while the most distinctive prize in the list is the Gene Wyatt Award for the film that “best embodies the spirit of the South.” The handily-titled “Beasts of the Southern Wild” beat “Bernie” to the punch, though I wonder how many votes “The Paperboy” got. Full list of winners after the jump; check out everything else at The Circuit.

Best Picture
“Argo” (runner-up: “Zero Dark Thirty”)

Best Director
Ben Affleck, “Argo” (runner-up: Kathryn Bigelow, “Zero Dark Thirty”)

Best Actor
Daniel Day-Lewis, “Lincoln” (runner-up: Joaquin Phoenix, “The Master”)

Best Actress
Jennifer Lawrence, “Silver Linings Playbook” (runner-up: Jessica Chastain, “Zero Dark Thirty”)

Best Supporting Actor
Philip Seymour Hoffman, “The Master” (runner-up: Tommy Lee Jones, “Lincoln”)

Best Supporting Actress
Anne Hathaway, “Les Miserables” (runner-up: Sally Field, “Lincoln”)

Best Original Screenplay
“Moonrise Kingdom” (runner-up: “Zero Dark Thirty”)

Best Adapted Screenplay
“Argo” (runner-up: “Lincoln”)

Best Foreign Language Film
“The Intouchables” (runner-up: “Amour”)

Best Animated Film
“ParaNorman” (runner-up: “Frankenweenie”)

Best Documentary
“The Queen of Versailles” (runner-up: “Bully”)

Best Ensemble
“Lincoln” (runner-up: “Moonrise Kingdom”)

Best Cinematography
“Life of Pi” (runner-up: “Skyfall”)

Gene Wyatt Award (Spirit of the South)
“Beasts of the Southern Wild” (runner-up: “Bernie”)

Top 10 Films
1. “Argo”
2. “Zero Dark Thirty”
3. “Lincoln”
4. “Moonrise Kingdom”
5. “Silver Linings Playbook”
6. “Beasts of the Southern Wild”
7. “The Master”
8. “Les Miserables”
9. “Life of Pi”
10. “The Dark Knight Rises”